Allen's Little Palestra closed its doors 40 years ago Wednesday

Allen's legendary Little Palestra closed its doors for the last time 40 years ago tonight.

Allen’s cozy Little Palestra was considered a palace of high school… (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO, THE…)

February 12, 2013|By Jeff Schuler, Of The Morning Call

When it opened, it was considered the palace of high school gyms.

In its waning years, former Allentown High player and coach John Donmoyer remembers one observer describing the Little Palestra as a "telephone booth with baskets on each end."

In between, Allen High's beloved and cozy gym, which closed its doors for the final time 40 years ago tonight, served as the backdrop for the golden era of high school basketball in Allentown and the Lehigh Valley.

In its 43 seasons (1930-31 to 1972-73) as home of the Canaries until it was replaced by the current Milo Sewards Gym in the Physical Education Center, the double-decked, 2,200-seat gym hosted 17 East Penn League champions, nine District 11 titlists and all five of the school's state championship squads.

"There were times in the late 1940s when the adage against betting against the Yankees, Notre Dame and Rocky Marciano came to include the Canaries in the Palestra," Morning Call columnist John Kunda wrote after Central Catholic spoiled Allen's farewell party with a 75-63 East Penn League victory in the final game on Feb. 13, 1973.

"It was a home-court advantage unlike anything anybody else had," said current Allen coach Doug Snyder, who led Allen with 16 points in that final game as a junior for Milo Sewards' Canaries. "It was cozy, intimate — you had kids hanging from the rafters, and the fans were just on top of you."

Legend has it, as told by Kunda in that article, that Canaries coach J.Birney Crum — yes, the man for whom the Allen football stadium is named (he was the school's head football, basketball and baseball coach from 1925 to 1951) — lobbied for a new gym virtually from the day he was hired.

However, Crum had difficulty gaining support from the school board — until, the story continues, a board member was unable to get through the doors of the school's gym for a key game. Reportedly, the next day he called Crum to begin the campaign for a new gym.

The Little Palestra, which included a pool on the bottom floor, cost $375,000 to build, according to newspaper reports. It was built where the school's current library and science center now stand, next to Jack Coffied Stadium, which was then the school's football field (and site of the current gym), with the main entrance off Linden Street.

The Canaries beat Pottsville 36-11 in the first game in their new home (and season opener) on Dec. 12, 1931. According to the next day's newspaper, 1,000 people attended the debut, but over the years "you had a full house almost every night," said Donmoyer, who watched games from the stands as a grade school and junior high student. He played under Sewards before graduating in 1957, and returned as his assistant coach in 1966 before succeeding Sewards as head coach in 1974.

No one is quite sure how the gym got its name, but obviously there's a reference to Penn's fabled Palestra, which opened three years earlier in Philadelphia. From the outside, the two buildings looked similar, featuring brick facades with large windows and white masonry.

Since the word "palestra" was used by the ancient Greeks to describe a public place for athletic training and practice, it could be that the adjective was eventually added to differentiate between the two.

Although considered state of the art when it opened, the gym certainly had its quirks that gave the Canaries one of the most unique home-court advantages in the sport.

First, the court was undersized, measuring 78 feet by 44 feet. That's 16 feet shorter and six feet narrower than the floor the Canaries currently play on in Sewards Gym. That led to more offense, Donmoyer and Snyder said, including the Feb. 19, 1971, evening when the head coach's son, Pat Sewards, scored an EPL record 62 points in a little less than three quarters against Tamaqua.

"That's the night a Tamaqua sportswriter wrote that the Little Palestra was nothing more than a telephone booth with baskets on each end," Donmoyer, now coaching at Moravian Academy, said with a chuckle.

Also, instead of meeting at a right angle, each corner was angled about three feet in, creating niches in the court. No one seems to know why.

The scorer's table, instead of being located at midcourt, was under the Linden Street basket, with a "box" at the other end where the school's pep band sat. The teams sat on opposite sides of the court in the front row of the bleachers; to check in, players had to go down the sideline to get to the scorer's table.

"That's pretty funny now that I think about it," said Donmoyer. "The players had to wait until the action was at the band end of the floor, because otherwise a teammate might mistake them for being in the game and throw them the ball out of bounds."